Women's fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction represent the complex nexus of continuity and change in the British consciousness following the Second World War. These essays restore the cultural and literary significance of women as readers and writers, examining their various transmutations of international, national and domestic politics. The women-centred writing illuminated in this collection also enhances the tradition-in-process of twentieth-century women's literature. Writers discussed include Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Agatha Christie and Stevie Smith.

Includes contributions from top-name academics, including Elizabeth Maslen, Julia Briggs, Linden Peach, Claire Tylee, Maroula Joannou, Kate Fulbrook, Susan Watkins and Clare Hanson

Chronology Introduction; J.Dowson PART 1: THE LEGACY OF WAR - CONTINUITY AND CHANGE Legacies of the Past: Postwar Women Looking Forward and Back; E.Maslen Resisting Nostalgia: Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love; J.Briggs Criminal Desires: Women's Crime Writing in the 1940s and 1950s; L.Peach 'The Same Sky': World War II and British Women's Writing for Stage and Screen; C. Ylee PART 2: THE HOME - RETREAT AND RESTRAINT 'No Home of One's Own': Elizabeth Taylor's At Mrs Lippincote's; J.Brannigan Souls Astray: Belonging and the Idea of Home: Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, Betty Miller's On the Side of the Angels and Death of the Nightingale and Muriel Spark's Memento Mori; S.Sceats 'At home everywhere and nowhere': Denise Levertov's 'Domestic' Muse; A.Entwistle PART 3: GENDER, LOVE AND MARRIAGE Nancy Mitford and the Pursuit of Love; M.Joannou Retreating into History? Historical Novels by Women Writers, 1945-60; D.Wallace Writing A Man's World: An Exploration of Three Works by Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Cecil Woodham Smith; K.Bell Female Masculinity in Iris Murdoch's Early Fiction; T.Grimshaw PART 4: ACROSS THE THRESHOLD - SPIRITUALITY, COLONISATION AND SUBJECTIVITY The Presentation of the Self in Doris Lessing's Martha Quest; K.Fullbrook 'Going Home': Exile and Nostalgia in the Writing of Doris Lessing; S.Watkins 'The Raw and the Cooked': Barbara Pym and Claude Levi-Strauss; C.Hanson 'There is a sweetness in willing self-surrender'?: Self-loss and Renewal in the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings, Kathleen Raine and Stevie Smith; J.Dowson Index